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Tracing the outer shape of the sketch with the Pen Tool.

Quick reference

First Pass

Tracing the outer shape of the sketch with the Pen Tool.

When to use

It is usually best to start with an outline for the sketch or photo that you want to trace before working your way inwards. Once you have an outline you can always come back to it later if you want to add a line around your entire subject. This is generally easier than merging all of your separate shapes at the end to try and get an outer path. It also helps to give us a sense of how things are looking before we get lost in any of the details.

Instructions

  • Open the First Pass - Exercise.ai file in Illustrator
  • After opening the file, press 'P' to switch to your Pen Tool and make sure that you have a solid black stroke selected with no fill color.
  • Select your Trace layer and then zoom into the sketch before clicking and making your first point with the Pen Tool.
  • Continue to work your way around the shape to create an outline.
  • Once you make your way around the shape you can take a look and see if there are any areas you would like to add to or change, and since we are working on an entirely separate layer from our sketch we don't have to worry about messing anything up.
  • After you have closed the path and finished creating an outline, make the line a bit heavier by using the Stroke Panel and increasing the weight of the outline.

Hints & tips

  • When you begin tracing the outline, remember to click to make a point, and then if you want to create a smooth curve, click and hold your cursor before moving it around. You can use the guides created by the Pen Tool to see the shape and trajectory of your lines, and if you mess anything up you can always use the handles and anchor points to modify your curves.

 

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  • 00:05 Once our file and our layer set up, we can begin to trace our sketch.
  • 00:09 First thing I'm gonna do is just minimize the layer's palette to get out of the way.
  • 00:13 And then I'm just gonna move my pen tool over here and
  • 00:15 press D on the keyboard to make sure that I have my default colors.
  • 00:19 Now before I do anything else I wanna make sure that I have none for the fill colors.
  • 00:23 So I'm just gonna check off this little box here and
  • 00:27 now all I have is a solid black stroke.
  • 00:29 All right, and
  • 00:30 hopefully you guys have a little bit of practice with the pen tool at this point.
  • 00:33 And if not, you know, I'll show you guys the basic idea, click and
  • 00:37 hold any time that you want to make a curve.
  • 00:39 And then releasing the mouse once you're done.
  • 00:42 Now, if instead I just were click here and then click there,
  • 00:46 you'll see I can have this jagud angular point.
  • 00:49 But instead, l want this kind of smooth rounded corner.
  • 00:51 So I'm clicking and holding and
  • 00:53 moving my cursor around until I can follow the shape of my drawing below.
  • 00:59 And the same thing would apply if I were tracing a photo, right?
  • 01:02 It doesn't really matter, whether it's an illustration, a photograph.
  • 01:06 The same thing can be applied any time you're tracing something in Illustrator.
  • 01:13 So all I'm gonna do here is just kinda, you know, continue to follow the outline.
  • 01:18 Of my drawing, so we have a base to start from and
  • 01:22 it is okay if everything is not perfectly symmetrical at first.
  • 01:26 We can always come back and change that, afterwards.
  • 01:30 And the reason I like to kinda start with the outermost shape.
  • 01:33 Is that it gives me a sense of how things are looking before I get lost in
  • 01:38 the details.
  • 01:38 I think a lot of times people wanna jump right into the details right off the bat.
  • 01:43 Before actually building the foundation and getting a good structure to follow.
  • 01:51 All right, it also gives us more control because,
  • 01:54 if later on down the road we wanted to add.
  • 01:56 Say an outline around our entire shape, it's gonna be a lot easier for
  • 02:01 us to do that.
  • 02:02 Since we have this outline to work from.
  • 02:08 All right, but another way that we could do something like that is simply
  • 02:11 by merging the shapes at the end.
  • 02:14 Into one and then using that as kind of an outline.
  • 02:18 And you know, we're also not tied to this,
  • 02:20 I mean we're not really tied to this shape at all.
  • 02:23 We don't have to follow it exactly, but I think just to get the ball rolling and
  • 02:27 to get warmed up, right?
  • 02:29 We're getting warmed up with the pen tool.
  • 02:32 We're kinda starting off with some basic stuff and larger shapes.
  • 02:36 Before we focus on some of the smaller details and
  • 02:38 elements that we're gonna be creating.
  • 02:44 Now again, if I wanted to,
  • 02:45 I wouldn't necessarily have to also use black while I do this.
  • 02:48 I could do this with any color, as long as it's something that's going to stand out,
  • 02:53 that I can see on top of the sketch.
  • 02:57 But because the sketch is black, we've dimmed it and
  • 03:00 that will make it a lot easier for us to see as we go along.
  • 03:04 So on this corner, for example,
  • 03:05 say I wanted to put just a little spike kinda like I did over here on the left.
  • 03:10 I'm just gonna go a little bit away from the sketch there,
  • 03:14 click on this anchor point here.
  • 03:16 And then click and drag to make a new curve, okay?
  • 03:21 And then I can kinda see where that connects on the other side.
  • 03:26 I'm gonna click and hold and then click on my last point before I continue.
  • 03:32 So I can get more precision and
  • 03:33 control over each of these anchor points and shapes.
  • 03:41 All right, you'll see once you're comfortable with the pen tool.
  • 03:45 This part will actually go by pretty fast, but it is a good way to get started.
  • 03:50 So, if I were just click here, you can see where that line would go bow way out.
  • 03:56 Away from where our sketch is, away from where this line in the original horn is.
  • 04:00 So instead, what I would wanna do is just click on this point,
  • 04:03 get rid of that handle and now I have much more control over that point.
  • 04:09 Okay, so now that I've closed my shape.
  • 04:11 I can open up my layers once again and just turn off the sketch layer for
  • 04:14 a second, so you guys can see what we have.
  • 04:18 Okay, so now we just have this basic outline, but
  • 04:21 without our sketch layer turned on.
  • 04:23 We can kind of see some of these area that we may wanna fix or smooth out.
  • 04:27 So I'm just gonna grab this point with my direct selection tool by pressing a on
  • 04:30 the keyboard and clicking on this anchor point.
  • 04:33 And I can either delete that point or
  • 04:35 just use the handles to kind of manipulate it a little bit.
  • 04:38 But I think in this case I'm actually going to just delete that anchor point.
  • 04:44 But because I added that point I do need to fix it, so I'm just gonna click
  • 04:49 down here, click on this point up top And there you go.
  • 04:57 All right, one other thing I can do here if I want to,
  • 04:59 is to just come over to my stroke panel.
  • 05:01 And I can increase the weight of this outline, so
  • 05:03 you can see it a little bit better.
  • 05:05 So here, I'm just changing the weight to two.
  • 05:08 I'll turn my sketch layer back on and now you could see that we've already started
  • 05:11 to kind of go a little bit away from the sketch.
  • 05:14 Because we wanna to look a little bit cleaner and
  • 05:16 to kinda cover up some of those imperfections from the hand sketch.
  • 05:21 All right, so from this point, we can begin working on some of the inner shapes
  • 05:25 and isolating some of these areas a bit more.

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